Video of ceramic storage system prototype surfaces online — 10,000TB cartridges bombarded with laser rays could become mainstream by 2030, making slow hard drives and tapes obsolete::Ceramics-based storage medium consumes very little energy and lasts more than 5,000 years, creators say
Thermal variations over time: Hold my beer.
I thought latency was measured in seconds for these?
At 10,000tb, it could have a latency of 5 minutes and it’d probably still be useful for long term storage.
Edit: it’s also useful to note that it sounds like these are write-once, read many. That means for consumers, they might eventually replace Blurays, but they probably won’t be replacing your hard drive.
Yeah that would be the only useful use case. However I think with even a few seconds of latency I could deal with that for things like video playback since it would quite literally up my storage by a few orders of magnitude.
Yeah it wasn’t so long ago that hard drive storage was more expensive than spindles of CD-Rs and that was around the time that internet and torrenting were taking off. People used to burn CDs full of movies to share and make room to download more. In that use case a unit of 700 MB on write once read many storage was useful if cheap.
Depending on price, consumers may be able to afford multiples. They could in theory use them until no space remains. This would be be fine for any data storage that people want, but obvious wouldn’t be good as your c drive.
Also, if they can truly be manufactured on the cheap, it could be a good backup system for anyone with a digital collection of photos / movies / etc. My photo collection doesn’t change much but takes up a decent amount of space. If I could buy one of these a year, dump a bunch of photos, then bury it in the yard (or whatever) for the event of a drive failure. I’d be cool with that - something sturdy enough to take some abuse as a backup drive with a long memory and low failure rate.
I’m sure the plates are reasonable but are you going to be sticking a electron microscope in your office…?
We’re talking about equipment that’s hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars in order to write and read from these plates.
Just wait until one of your techs drops a cassette of these glass and ceramic plates and suddenly your company is out 100,000TB of data.
The whole “it can last 5000 years” thing is somewhat ridiculous considering the library mechanisms, carriers for the slides and basically everything else not glass and ceramic probably won’t last more than 20 or 30.
But ceramic plates can probably be put into a working enclosure to get the data from it again
Just like how if you put a shattered CD in an apparatus, you can still use a laser reader to recover any data on the undamaged sections.
Though, because data is recorded in a circular pattern at high speeds, you won’t get much. Or what you get will have lots of corruption. I wonder what pattern of storage these plates use? If it’s similar to SSDs, then large files can be nested in a very small area of space - increasing the chances of recovery.
It is possible to make glass and ceramics that are resistant to shattering from fair hard impacts. I don’t know if that can be employed here, but there are other ways to deal with the problem.
Additionally, if 100,000 TB is something that people can carry by hand, then it is also possible to back up those drives relatively easily (relative to that technology).
Lastly, current silicon fabs have boxes of wafers that at the final stages can exceed $1M in the retail value. They have robots that handle those. If the 100,000 TB is worth something close to that, then a human will not be carrying it.
possible to make glass and ceramics that are resistant to shattering from fair hard impacts.
As far as I know, there is 1 storage technology that has survived wars. Paper.
Lastly, current silicon fabs have boxes of wafers that at the final stages can exceed $1M in the retail value. They have robots that handle those. If the 100,000 TB is worth something close to that, then a human will not be carrying it.
Pharma has entered the chat…they just have warehouse people riding forklifts with pallets worth much more than $1M.
I’m sure pharmacy has some crazy value density, but it’s hards to put accurate values on their products because of insurance.
The boxes of wafers I was talking about is roughly 1.5 ft cubed. The fabs will have hundreds of these boxes moving around by robots at any one time.
Isn’t that a concern with other tech too? If storage is cheaper, it would enable for more redundant copies
A lot of places just don’t have backups. I’m thinking of hospitals getting hit with ransomware attacks, some are fine and just pull from backups and others shell out lots of money.
I’d love to see cheaper enterprise storage since it’ll be easier to justify more backups. That single IT guy managing a hospital network could use a break…
Having backups at multiple sites is industry standard. Nobody is keeping 100,000TB of data in a single location.
As for your second point, I don’t see the relevance. You can store the glass wherever you want, the other mechanisms aren’t relevant for keeping the stored data.
I can’t wait to never be able to afford this
This will never be for the average consumer. By their marketing alone I can tell you they’re pretty much exclusively targeting large data centers with this tech.
How big were drives 10 years ago? 20 years ago? 30 years ago? Floppy disks were big for their time. They held 3.5" floppies held a whopping 1.44MB in 1986. Average new phones have capacity orders of a magnitude bigger than that.
You might need to take a step back and look at history before making such absolute claims.
What does this have to do with what I just said?
The problem isn’t how much data these can hold, but that they’re not rewritable. THAT is what makes them only useful to data centres.
You can only write to them once. But they’re not like hard disks or flash memory where you can delete the data and write again.
I wonder how many people said that about computers back in the day when they were occupying a whole room.
Now if they could only make one that only costs a couple thousand dollars and fits in a full height 5.25" drive bay.
Why would you want that? This is, permanent storage. You write to it and that’s it, it’ll hold the data, and only that data, forever.
This method of data storage will not be useful to the average consumer, and this company is hoping to replace hard drives in data centers for cold storage.
You had tricks on cd’s and such to make it kinda work as read/write storage.
Yeah, but this ceramic storage is literally lasers punching holes into a ceramic layer.
Why wouldn’t it be? Do you believe nobody stores data at home that they would want to have for longer than 5-10 years?
